We disconnected and I sat for a few moments with the phone in my hand feeling very low. I needed her home, and her mother too, but how could I bring them back to this house when there were men in balaclavas, together with petrol cans, determined to burn it down?

Charles arrived fifty minutes after I’d called him, and he was no longer in his pyjamas. In fact, he was wearing smartly pressed grey trousers, a starched white shirt with gold cufflinks, a double-breasted blazer, plus a striped tie and highly polished black shoes.

‘Casual would have been fine,’ I said, letting him in through the locked back door.

‘This is casual,’ he said. ‘Smart would have been a suit, or uniform.’

You can take an admiral out of the navy, I thought, but never the navy out of an admiral.

‘Now what is all this about?’ he asked.

‘Why does it have to be about anything?’

‘You’d never ring me before nine o’clock in the morning for nothing.’

He clearly knew me too well.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ I asked.

‘Black, please, no sugar.’

I used Marina’s newfangled coffee machine to make our drinks, popping in a couple of the foil capsules. I splashed some milk into mine, and then Charles and I sat down at the kitchen table.

‘Now,’ I said to him. ‘I have some things to tell you. You don’t have to do anything, I’d rather you didn’t, but I would like you to know a few details just in case.’

‘In case of what?’ he asked seriously.

‘In case I become incapacitated, or worse.’

‘I see. And is that likely?’

‘You know the two men in balaclavas I told you about, the ones who came looking for me in the car park at Catterick?’

He nodded.

‘Well, they turned up again here last night.’

I told him how it was only through the good fortune of Rosie’s reaction that I had avoided walking into their ambush. I also told him about the police arriving and then finding a container of petrol.

That shocked him.

Both he and I knew what villains with petrol were capable of. The front of his house still bore the physical scars, and we carried the mental ones with us every day.

‘So what did you tell the police?’ he asked.

‘Not much. They seem to think it was a potential burglary that I interrupted.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘No.’

‘So why didn’t you tell the police that?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘I have all day,’ Charles said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs. ‘And I’m pretty good at complicated.’

I told him about my trip north to see Marcus Capes, and also my second visit to Simon Paulson’s yard, and I summarised what they had both told me.

When I was finished, Charles sat silently for a few seconds, drumming his fingers on the table.